“It’s safer, less painful and less soul destroying to remain a dot watcher.”

With those words for inspiration, this post takes dot watching several levels too far.

For an introduction to Race to the Rock perhaps read about the first 2016 ride. Race to the rock happened again in 2017 and 2018. There’s an active online community serving up a constant stream of visual inspiration. And there’s this from northsouth. Wow. Anyway, this post is a little different, but hopefully adds another tasty tidbit to the race-to-the-rock soup.

Each rider carries a live gps tracker that, in combination with map progress website, provides easily accessible data. Roughly each 10 minutes you can find out where the rider was, the distance covered since the last data point and a few other bits of information. (The full data for 2018 is available here). Raw data shows what this raw data looks like. Some quick summary stats:

• The data set for the four finishers provided 10523 datapoints
• 11.1% of those datapoints were stopped (or less than 0.5 km/hr)
• 0.5% of those datapoints were above 30 km/h

What other insights can the dot watcher gain from playing with these data…

Distance

Figure 1 shows the cumulative distance by date. The purple dot is consistent!

Figure 1: Cumulative distance travelled by the four finishers

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Speeds

Figure 2 shows the distribution of speed in km/h. This is the average speed over each (roughly) 10 minute interval between data points. The singlespeeder certainly had a more pointy distribution than the other riders. And perhaps spent a lot of time walking (about 5 km/h) in the first week?

Erinn seemed to find a bit more top-end speed than the others, with 27 intervals above 30 km/h vs 7 for Sarah, 14 for Nick and 2 for Emma.

Figure 2: Distribution of speed

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Stoping times

Sarah spent much more time moving than the other finishers!

Figure 3: Total stopping time

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